'DIRTY PRETTY THINGS'

It's not your grandmother's London that emerges in "Dirty Pretty Things," a haunting drama from director Stephen Frears. Not the tourist land of Big Ben and the Tower of London but a shadowy reality of illegal immigrants scrambling to survive and avoid deportation.

British stage actor Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Okwe, a Nigerian doctor, lonely and soft-spoken, who works far below his skill as a cabbie and hotel clerk. One night while inspecting a hotel room, he finds a human heart in a toilet, which opens the door to a sinister black market in organ transplants.

It's a hideous fact that Frears ("The Grifters") and screenwriter Steven Knight use as the springboard for an exploration of isolation and ethical responsibility: An estimated 15,000 illegal transplants have been performed worldwide in recent years, usually involving wealthy Westerners and desperate Third Worlders who sell their organs, most often kidneys, to stay alive.

In this case, the kidneys are traded for counterfeit passports. Ejiofor, a brilliant actor, uses his sad, intelligent eyes to project deep reserves of conflict and mystery.

Okwe suffers a classic hero's dilemma: Should he err on the side of expediency and profit from the transplant trade or heed the ethical imperatives that made him the man he is today?

No easy solution. "There is nothing so dangerous," a friend reminds him, "as a virtuous man."

Frears, who explored similar communities of displaced foreigners in "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid," builds a world that's thick with atmosphere and potential peril. His cinematographer is the brilliant Chris Menges ("The Mission"), who submerges us in an exotic, subterranean London we've never seen before.

Watching Ejiofor -- an instant star -- is the primary draw in "Dirty Pretty Things." The rest of the multiculti cast, all playing immigrants in a country that's hostile to foreigners, is splendid: Audrey Tautou ("Amelie") as a Turkish Muslim hotel maid; Sergi Lopez ("With Friends Like Harry") as a sleazy Spanish hotel manager; Benedict Wong as Okwe's friend, a sardonic Asian morgue worker; Sophie Okonedo as a thick-skinned hooker; and Zlatko Buric as a Croatian doorman.

Regret hangs over "The Weather Underground," a documentary about the 1970s radical group. Powerful and surprisingly timely, the film explores the interweaving of idealism and terrorism and the frustration of true believers who found that neither approach resulted in much change.

San Franciscan Sam Green and co-director Bill Siegel mix stock footage of Vietnam-era news events with new interviews with former Weathermen. This isn't the usual middle-aged look back on youthful folly; these were activists so committed they cut themselves off from family and friends for nearly a decade.

Fueled by revolutions around the world -- China, Cuba, the Congo -- and by the failure of marches on Washington to stop the escalation of the Vietnam War,

the Weathermen splintered from Students for a Democratic Society in 1969. Led by the charismatic Bernardine Dohrn, among others, these educated, glamorous revolutionaries aimed to overthrow the government.

The idea of stopping horrifying violence in Vietnam by mounting a violent campaign of their own made perfect sense when accompanied by LSD and group sex.

But the movie also captures the sincere feeling of injustice that prompted such radicalism. As former group member Mark Rudd remembers, "I could be taking an acid trip, and I would be thinking about the Vietnam War." An excerpt of President Nixon deriding peace marchers underscores the activists' sense of futility -- and is eerily similar to President Bush's dismissal of anti-war rallies earlier this year.

Adopting the principle that white Americans' blindness about the war and the persecution of African Americans was tantamount to violence, the group planned to bomb a gathering at the Army's Fort Dix, a plan derailed when an accidental explosion in a New York City townhouse killed three group members. Shadowed by the FBI and shaken by the deaths, the group went underground and executed a series of bombings in government offices -- including one at San Francisco's Ferry Building -- while ensuring that there were no casualties. They didn't surrender until the late 1970s, when charges were dropped against them because of FBI malfeasance.

The impact of their long campaign is hard to gauge from the film, which actually downplays the group's significance. By 1973 or so, one interviewee says, nobody was talking about them on college campuses. This moment underscores the film's main flaw, which is assuming that the unrest of the Vietnam era is all the context needed.

More on the backgrounds of group members, whose defense of the downtrodden seems at least partly a response to their own "bourgeois" roots, might have helped illuminate their unusual fervor. Dohrn is especially intriguing because she was already a lawyer and in her late 20s when she started the Weathermen. Now a law professor at Northwestern, she could be mistaken for a congresswoman,

Romantic drama. Starring Jean-Pierre Bacri and Emilie Dequenne. Directed by Claude Berri. (R. 91 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Galaxy and the Oaks in Berkeley.)

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Everyone is in favor of sex, but only the French still find it interesting - - and believe that films such as "The Housekeeper" are worth the effort. The movie, the latest from director Claude Berri, isn't even a love story. It's rather a mere extended incident in the lives of two people, a dour middle-aged man and a shallow young woman. Yet somehow simply by focusing on these characters and following their emotions honestly, the movie makes its case.

In fact, it's refreshing to see a film about nothing but human emotion. Jean-Pierre Bacri plays a sound engineer whose wife has left him and whose apartment has, typically, gone to hell. He hires a young woman (Emilie Dequenne) to clean up twice a week, and next thing he knows, she's telling him that she needs a place to stay. He reluctantly agrees to put her up.

The movie shows our hero in bars, looking at women and not approaching them,

and then, finally, bringing himself to talk to a woman at a sidewalk cafe, only to be rejected. He hasn't been single in a while. He's out of practice. So when the young housekeeper, Laura, strolls out of his bedroom, wearing nothing but a sheer nightgown and a look that says, l'amour -- well, the soundtrack ought to be playing the "Hallelujah Chorus."

How this adorable and pleasingly plump young thing could possibly convince herself she's in love with this taciturn father figure is beyond me, though it's a spectacle sure to lighten the heart of every middle-aged man, French or otherwise. The rest of the movie is merely a document of their affair and of those subtle shifts in power to which French filmmakers and high school students everywhere are especially attuned.

I like the way Bacri, through the clamped-down facade of this fellow, is able to convey his growing affection for a woman he knows he can never really open up to. Even as he's enjoying himself, he's lonely. Dequenne is also interesting for the way she makes Laura both sensitive and superficial, irresistible and uninteresting, impossible to leave and easy to forget -- in short, a kid.

One of these days, a real artist is going to get hold of this 3-D IMAX technology and make a movie that changes the face of cinema. In the meantime, we'll have to settle for nature films like "Bugs!," which brings us into the rain forest of Borneo to meet a friendly caterpillar and a somewhat more complicated praying mantis.

By the standards of most IMAX films, this is a bizarre entry, a documentary about bugs that was produced by Terminix, the pest control company. Perhaps that should have been the tip-off. Though it's pitched to children, "Bugs!" is one G-rated film all but guaranteed to send the kiddies out sobbing, when the caterpillar-turned-butterfly accidentally runs into the praying mantis and . . . But no, let's not give anything away.

In any case, parents who decide to risk Bambi's mother syndrome should also be prepared to explain the scene in which the male mantis stands on the female mantis' back. And parents should be ready to clarify why exactly the male is so concerned about getting his head bitten off.

"Bugs!" was narrated by Dame Judi Dench, who says "bugs" in a way that sounds more like "bucks," and that, combined with a jazzy Henry Mancini-like soundtrack, makes the movie seem, at first, like a documentary about '60s Vegas. We see the caterpillar and mantis being born. The caterpillar breaks out of the shell and then eats the shell. The mantis pops out of a . . . mantis thing, I believe is the scientific term, and quickly starts biting the heads off flies.

The view is privileged and the IMAX 3-D technology is stunning -- a world beyond the blurry inexactitude of "Spy Kids 3." But the movie is without the poetry of Jacques Perrin's great bug film, "Microcosmos." It should also be said that the bug faces are a little hard to take in a 100-foot close-up, especially when they're eating.